Silent



A man and his child are using a shadow box to entertain passersby, when the contraption suddenly breaks. With no money to show for their efforts, they’re forced to seek refuge from a rainstorm under the awning of a closed theater. But a strange light soon beacons them inside, where they find themselves traveling through the history of cinema and finally find the audience they’ve always wanted.



Silent is a short, animated film currently available on Netflix. Truth be told, it’ll take me probably 20x longer to write this up and 3x longer for you to read about it, than it would for you to actually go and watch the short. Because even by “short” standards, this is pretty short, clocking in at only 2 minutes and 35 seconds, and that includes the credits. And there’s a lot they crammed in there in that short amount of time. But we like to pretend to be professionals here at Random Movie Musings, so instead of just saying “Go watch the short”, let’s get into it….



…Okay, honestly, it’s kinda hard to talk in-depth about something that’s barely 2 minutes long. But at least on the technical side the short seems to be very well put together. It’s filled with a lot of cute designs, was clearly carefully choreographed and planned, and was smoothly animated. It also has a lot of nice, appropriate music (but no dialogue) to accompany the various scenes it’s paying homage to, including nods to Safety Last!, King Kong, North by Northwest, and zombie movies, amongst many others. So the short looks and sounds very nice, and there’s nothing to complain about on that end.









But, this is me, so of course I have to find something to nitpick about. And for this short, that nitpick comes in two parts. The first is that the film is just too short. Because while I liked all the films the short was referencing, I felt that they could have gone a lot farther than they did and added a lot more, cause it sort of felt like they hit a certain point and went “eh, good enough” and just stopped. Plus, without the aid of dialogue, a few extra seconds couldn’t have hurt to get the meaning of the end of the film across a little more clearly.



And my second nitpick is that I’m not really sure who this was made for. Or rather, I wasn’t sure who it was for until after I looked it up. Because while the short is cute and all, and doesn’t have any content in it that would be too objectionable (at least not that I could see, but I’m a desensitized heathen) to the point that you couldn’t let even the youngest kid watch it, this isn’t really something that’s meant for kids, either. The references used are so old that the youngsters just aren’t going to get most of them, if they’d even understand what the film was doing at all. So obviously this was made primarily for movie buffs. But it’s done in such a cutesy way that I doubt a lot of movie fans would take much note of it. So its creation seems kinda random. And, you know what, maybe it was. Because upon further investigation, I see that the film was (at least partially) produced by Dolby Laboratories. As in, the Dolby Sound people. Which would explain the movie’s focus on a small child scoring various films. So I guess the film also doubles as kind of an ad? I don’t know. Either way though, I feel that my point about the film’s target audience of the film being very confusing still stands.



Regardless of intention though, Silent still ends up being a cute little short film about the evolution of early cinema. Is it perfect? No. It moves so quickly that there’s not much of a story to speak of, and the references come at you so fast and furious that you’d probably have to watch it a couple of times to get them all. But it’s short enough that it simply ends up being a nice little distraction, and doesn’t feel like an epic waste of time. So if you like movie history, it’s surely worth at least one watch. But if you’re looking for something with more depth, I think it’s safe to say that you’re not going to find it in something that’s less than 3 minutes long.

Silent is available on Netflix and Youtube.

Feel free to watch it here: